The election will be exciting, though unskewedpolls.com has it being a landslide for Romney. That would be boring. I'm quite curious how the local congressional election will work out. This is the guy running: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/21/steve-king-immigrants-dogs_n_1998007.html I haven't seen a new poll since the end of September, when there were like 4. No indication of what is going to happen. As I'm sure I've remarked earlier, though I would probably identify with political solutions further "left" than the political consensus in America, I don't particularly mind Republicans per se if they get things done, but this man ought to be unelectable. Much like Bachmann. http://www.salon.com/2012/10/23/steve_king_didnt_build_that/

Since it will be consistently cold, I think it may be time to put up the plastic on the windows. Sigh.

I have another theory test on Friday. This should not be too bad. I am still undecided about what elective to take next semester. Given how much I hate methods, I've been idly looking at the math and CS departments to see what their co-major PhD thing is like - that's one way to get out of doing the PhD-level Methods in statistics, see. But the CS seems to require too much extraneous CS and the math requires too much extraneous math, so, nuts to that.

Did you like the UK Sherlock that by ambrosen (2.00 / 0) #1Sat Oct 27, 2012 at 05:12:39 PM EST

Elementary was based on?

much much more by gzt (2.00 / 0) #2Sat Oct 27, 2012 at 05:32:52 PM EST

c'mon, though, they're not based on each other at all. there have been 100 different sherlock adaptations over the years. even though this is a modern setting like sherlock, it really is going for a different take.

we're also watching a bit of the jeremy britt one. it's better than elementary, too.

I can imagine it helping for languages similar to your own where you're likely to be able to pick up the grammar. But I got the Japanese version, and it would have been utterly useless if I wasn't also getting direct detailed instructions in the grammar. Knowing the grammar and having had instructions in the writing systems, I saw many places where the Rosetta stone lessons were outright misleading about why an answer is "right" .---[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

i learned a lot from rosetta stone products, almost as much as i learned about computers and the internet from the video professor products i purchased after seeing them advertised on cable news. just goes to show you can learn a lot from watching the o'reilly factor.

Rosetta stone goes by the theory that you can learn grammar entirely by example, without being explicitly taught the rules. That simply does not work for languages where the grammar has rules that have no analogues at all in the language you know.

For instance, for many relations, Japanese has two entirely different words based on who is talking. "Mother" can be "okaasan" or "haha" depending on whether you are talking about your mother or someone else's or more confusingly, whether you are talking about your mother or addressing her. How on Earth are you going to explain that to an English speaker in pictures alone? Rosetta stone's pictures on the subject at best lead you to think one is what a child uses and one is what an adult uses, which is of course completely wrong.

Also, I find it hard to believe that anyone would ever correctly grok that the Japanese 'r' and the Japanese 'n' is pronounced differently from the English one simply by hearing it. I honestly never heard the difference until I was explicitly told it was there.

It certainly did help me with vocab, but only as a companion to real lessons and lots of books on grammar.

I would imagine that it would work better with European languages, where the differences are lessoned. The links gzt pointed to certainly confirm my suspicions about how good it would be for Arabic and Chinese, which are as different from English as Japanese is.---[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

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